FEATURE
BY BRENDAN READ,
CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
THE CHATGPT REVOLUTION?
Will, and how, this new technology model help
contact centers?
MAY 2023
CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
or the past several months the technology conversation
has been dominated by the emergence of ChatGPT, first
GPT-3, then GPT-3.5, and most recently (at presstime) GPT-
4. But could it revolutionize the contact center industry?
To get a handle on ChatGPT, its implications, benefits, challeng-
es, and best practices for contact centers we had a virtual con-
versation recently with Nathan Hart, Senior Director of Technol-
ogy, Solutioning & Data Analytics, The Northridge Group.
Q: WHAT IS CHATGPT, SPECIFICALLY CHATGPT BASED
ON GPT-4, AND WHAT LED TO ITS CREATION AND
BY WHOM?
A: ChatGPT, short for Chat-based Generative Pre-trained
Transformer, is a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence
(AI)-powered natural language processing (NLP) model cre-
ated by OpenAI, a company co-founded in 2015 to advance
digital intelligence in the way it can interact with humans.
The most recent version of ChatGPT, which is based on GPT-
4 and was released in March 2023, is OpenAI’s latest and most
advanced chatbot.
Open AI has developed what is known as open domain bots
that can understand nearly any question related to the sub-
ject matter of their design – in this case conversations.
This technology equips ChatGPT to hold conversations
about almost anything without any prior programming or
configuration. It has immense promise not only for enabling
people to talk with machines but also for improving custom-
er service, providing emotional support, and revolutionizing
key processes associated with other lines of work that are
currently done solely by humans.
THE CHATGPT REVOLUTION?
FEATURE
BY BRENDAN READ, CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
WILL, AND HOW, THIS NEW TECHNOLOGY
MODEL HELP CONTACT CENTERS?
ILLUSTRATION PROVIDED BY ADOBE IMAGES
NATHAN HART
MAY 2023
From our research, GPT-4 is more sophisticated than any of
its predecessors:
• It can understand various types of information, including
images with complex entity recognition, which is a signifi-
cant improvement over its predecessor, GPT-3.5, which was
limited to text-based input.
• It has other powerful upgrades such as integrated intent
classifiers and specialized custom context preservation
with every sentence.
In addition, GPT-4 is more resistant to manipulation. It has
a greater capacity to remember information, allowing it to
respond with more accurate and relevant responses. GPT-4
is also proficient in multiple languages, making it more ac-
cessible and user-friendly for people from different linguistic
backgrounds.
Finally, GPT-4 enables users to customize their personalities
to meet their specific needs, which enhances its adaptability
and flexibility in different situations.
Q: WHAT ARE THE KEY FEATURES OF CHATGPT
BASED ON GPT-4?
A: ChatGPT provides a powerful set of features to enable the
creation of Conversational AI applications. It leverages natu-
ral language understanding and machine learning technology.
The key features of ChatGPT include a wide variety of
pre-trained models that can be used across various forms
of networking channels. It also has numerous deep learning
models, a configurable text generator refined on massive
datasets, customization capabilities that enable fine-tuning
to user-defined parameters, and easy integration with other
Conversational AI platforms.
ChatGPT’s state-of-the-art tools make it possible for users
to easily construct sophisticated Conversational AI applica-
tions quickly and efficiently. GPT-4 boasts some crucial ad-
vancements over its predecessors. These include the ability to
process images, a greater ability to avoid being tricked, a lon-
ger memory, more multilingual skills, and greater steerability.
Q: HOW DOES CHATGPT, BASED ON GPT-4, WORK?
A: ChatGPT uses NLP techniques to analyze and understand
text input and generate human-like responses. It was created
using AI techniques called transfer and generative learning.
Transfer learning allows a pre-trained machine learning
system to be adapted to another task. Generative learning
allows for tasks like text generation, conversation, and ques-
tion-answering, where the goal is to create new, original con-
tent that is coherent and contextually relevant.
The model was trained on massive data, allowing it to learn
patterns and relationships in language, and generate coher-
ent responses to a wide range of queries and topics. ChatGPT
was designed to be highly versatile and assist with various
tasks, from answering questions and providing recommenda-
tions to generating text and translations.
Users can interact with ChatGPT via text-based chat in-
terfaces, such as messaging platforms or websites that offer
chat functionality. The model uses machine learning algo-
rithms to continuously improve its performance and accuracy
based on user interactions and feedback.
But ChatGPT can do much more than just reply. For in-
stance, it can provide proactive suggestions, understand
past context, and proactively suggest answers. It can also be
easily integrated via APIs with popular apps such as Slack,
Instacart, Snapchat, or Facebook Messenger for easy access
across multiple platforms. ChatGPT utilizes deep learning al-
gorithms to learn from every conversation it has and become
smarter over time.
BENEFITS, CHALLENGES, AND
INTERACTION TYPES
Q: WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF GPT-4 AND ALSO ITS
CHALLENGES?
A: ChatGPT, based on GPT-4, can process conversations on a
human-like level. In addition to its impressive accuracy over
traditional methods of NLP, GPT-4 brings several advantag-
es to conversations, such as decreased time investments,
heightened interactivity and reactions, and increased speed
and fluency.
However, GPT-4 poses some challenges regarding security
and privacy risks. Because GPT-4 relies on trained databases to
generate responses, confidential information can be accessed
or misused without the knowledge of the user or the provider.
Therefore, when thinking about testing and implementing
GPT-4 within a contact center, users, such as data security
and infrastructure teams, must exercise caution by proper-
ly configuring their datasets and mitigating the risks to any
networks they use with strong authentication practices.
...CHATGPT...HAS IMMENSE
PROMISE NOT ONLY FOR
ENABLING PEOPLE TO TALK WITH
MACHINES BUT ALSO FOR
IMPROVING CUSTOMER SERVICE...
...GPT-4 POSES SOME CHALLENGES
REGARDING SECURITY AND PRIVACY
RISKS...CONFIDENTIAL
INFORMATION CAN BE ACCESSED OR
MISUSED WITHOUT THE KNOWLEDGE
OF THE USER OR THE PROVIDER.
CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
Q: DO YOU THINK, THEN, THAT CHATGPT/GPT-4
COULD REVOLUTIONIZE THE CONTACT CENTER
INDUSTRY, GIVEN THE CHALLENGES LIKE ENSUR-
ING A HIGH QUALITY COMPETITIVE CX AND COP-
ING WITH STAFFING SHORTAGES? OR DO YOU
SEE IT MORE LIKE AN EVOLUTIONARY MOVE?
A: GPT-4 has the capacity to revolutionize the contact cen-
ter industry, yet reaching that goal will be a slow and evolu-
tionary process. Its potential to improve customer experience
(CX) by automating certain customer interactions, helping
with staffing shortages, and providing multilingual, round-
the-clock contact center support – all at reduced costs, is
nothing less than revolutionary.
However, before contact center agents can relinquish the
handling of routine tasks to GPT-4 so they can become more
efficient and focus on more complex interactions, various
challenges must be resolved, certain risks must be mitigated,
and a new level of trust in GPT-4’s responses will be neces-
sary. This will be an evolutionary process for the contact cen-
ter industry which could take up to two – five years.
AVAILABILITY AND SUPPLIERS
Q: WHEN DO YOU EXPECT CHATGPT/GPT-4 TO BE
READY FOR PRIME TIME? WHAT NEEDS TO BE
DONE AT THIS STAGE TO MAKE IT USABLE IN THE
CONTACT CENTER?
A: ChatGPT was initially developed as a high-end natural lan-
guage processor specifically designed to be used in contact
centers.
Currently, the technology is still undergoing beta testing
and evaluation, as developers work towards making it ready
for prime-time use. My estimation is that ChatGPT technol-
ogy will be appropriate for contact centers within the next
two to five years, but it will require extensive supervision and
act as a supplement to human associates.
To make ChatGPT optimally functional within customer
service operations, developers need to invest further in in-
creasing the accuracy of the AI’s natural language generation
capabilities and improving the overall quality of its simulated
conversational interaction with customers. They also need to
optimize its classification and object recognition performance.
Despite these challenges, careful handling of GPT-4 can un-
lock tremendous value for both users and providers by im-
proving efficiency and increasing the effectiveness of com-
munication strategies.
Q: COMPARE AND CONTRAST CHATGPT WITH OTH-
ER CUSTOMER AND ALSO INTERNAL EMPLOYEE
CHAT TECHNOLOGIES. DOES IT SUPPLEMENT OR
SUPPLANT OTHER CHAT TOOLS?
A: ChatGPT stands out from other available tools. Its features
make it more efficient than traditional customer service mes-
saging platforms.
For example, GPT-4’s NLP enables it to better understand
customer needs and respond quickly to requests. Addition-
ally, its capacity for personalized conversations allows com-
panies to provide more targeted customer care in real-time.
Many existing chat technologies still rely on simple scripts
and pre-programmed generic responses, which do not add
value to the conversation.
GPT-4 is uniquely positioned to supplement or even sup-
plant certain aspects of existing internal chat technologies
while improving overall efficiency. This makes it a highly
valuable tool for customers and employees alike (see chart).
Q: WHAT TYPES OF CUSTOMER INTERACTIONS: B2B
OR B2C, WILL CHATGPT PROVIDE THE MOST BEN-
EFITS OR CONVERSELY THE LEAST AND WHY?
A: I do not think there will be a huge difference in the way
ChatGPT will handle B2B and B2C customer interactions, so
the benefits it brings to contact center interactions for both
customer types will be similar.
GPT-4’s responses will be highly dependent on the type of
interactions it is exposed to. It will be good at responding to
simple interactions but will be less capable of offering appro-
priate responses to emotional issues that require the more
nuanced understanding that only human agents can provide.
Both B2B and B2C contact centers handle a full range of
simple and complex issues, so I anticipate that contact cen-
ter interactions for both customer types will benefit equally
from GPT-4.
GPT-4 HAS THE CAPACITY TO
REVOLUTIONIZE THE
CONTACT CENTER INDUSTRY,
YET REACHING THAT GOAL
WILL BE A SLOW AND
EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS.
MAY 2023
FEATURE
...THE TECHNOLOGY IS STILL
UNDERGOING BETA TESTING AND
EVALUATION, AS DEVELOPERS
WORK TOWARDS MAKING IT READY
FOR PRIME-TIME USE.
SALESFORCE
Salesforce has expanded its contact center platform by in-
troducing Einstein GPT, a generative AI CRM technology, that
delivers AI-created content across sales, service, marketing,
commerce, and IT interactions, at a hyper-scale.
With Einstein GPT, customers can connect data to OpenAI’s
advanced AI models and use natural-language prompts di-
rectly within their Salesforce CRM to generate content that
continuously adapts to changing customer information and
needs in real-time.
FIVE9
Five9, a provider of cloud contact center software, has intro-
duced two new products that use GPT 3.5 from OpenAI.
The first product, AI Insights, combines ChatGPT with re-
al-time transcription to automatically interpret and catego-
rize customer conversations. By grouping contacts by intent
or other traits, contact centers can identify opportunities to
improve automation and other processes.
The second product, “AI Summaries”, auto-summarizes
interaction transcripts and publishes them in the CRM to
streamline post-contact processing for agents.
According to Mike Burkland, Chairman and CEO of Five9, “these
new AI-powered offerings demonstrate Five9’s commitment
to continuous AI innovation, which is critical to the company’s
growth. The company’s AI and automation portfolio includes
speech analytics, workflow automation, and IVA solutions.”
ChatGPT is expected to play a significant role in fueling fur-
ther AI innovation at Five9. Its large language models offer
quick wins in custom data charting, trending, and routing, as
well as potential game-changing opportunities.
GENESYS
Genesys is currently beta-testing generative AI on its Cloud CX
platform for various use cases. These include new agent-as-
sist capabilities, such as summarization, which provides auto-
matically generated summaries for agents to accelerate their
work during wrap-up time following a voice call or a digital
interaction.
Other companies will likely follow suit but are proceeding
with caution. GPT-4’s knowledge base and language process-
ing capabilities far outpace other technology on the market,
but it still has limitations. Its responses, while remarkably ac-
curate and convincingly human, are based on the dataset it is
trained on, and they are not necessarily based on the truth or
the latest information.
Developers should test ChatGPT in a sandbox environment
that replicates a contact center environment before deploy-
ing it in contact centers. By enhancing all these aspects of
ChatGPT’s functionality, developers can make the technolo-
gy ready for use in real-world contact center operations and
provide novel opportunities for companies to interact more
effectively with customers.
The scenario is like that of driverless cars. The technolo-
gy for providing AI-powered accurate issue resolution will be
available, but some interactions will lack the nuance needed
to make customers comfortable. Customers will always ap-
preciate the human touch and the empathy that human as-
sociates are trained to provide.
Q: WHERE ARE THE CONTACT CENTER INDUSTRY
VENDORS ON CHATGPT?
A: ChatGPT is fast out of the gate and is rapidly evolving.
So, what you read at this moment could change in the next
instance. But here is what we have gathered, seen, and ana-
lyzed to date for our clients.
NICE
NICE appears to be the first contact center industry vendor
to move forward with this technology, announcing on Jan-
uary 26, 2023, that it will integrate its CXone Expert with
the generative modeling used in ChatGPT. CXone Expert is a
cloud-native customer service knowledge management solu-
tion that delivers answers for resolving customer issues.
The goal of integrating NICE CXone Expert with OpenAI’s
generative modeling is to ensure that the resulting answers
to customer self-service inquiries are not only quick and high-
ly accurate but that they are also semantically constructed in
a human-friendly manner that is easy to understand.
The technology should immediately route customers to the
right answers without the need for transfers or callbacks, cre-
ating self-service experiences that feel human without en-
gaging associates.
THE TECHNOLOGY FOR PROVIDING
AI-POWERED ACCURATE ISSUE
RESOLUTION WILL BE AVAILABLE,
BUT SOME INTERACTIONS WILL LACK
THE NUANCE NEEDED TO MAKE
CUSTOMERS COMFORTABLE.
CONTACT CENTER PIPELINE
COMPARISON OF TECHNOLOGIES
MAY 2023
Brendan Read is Editor of Contact Center Pipeline. He has been covering and
working in customer service and sales and for contact center companies
for most of his career. Brendan has edited and written for leading industry
publications and has been an industry analyst. He also has authored and
co-authored books on contact center design, customer support, and working
from home. Brendan can be reached at
brendan@contactcenterpipeline.com.
To ensure successful deployment, I would recommend set-
ting up a team dedicated to learning the ins and outs of chat-
bot conversations, so that they can design tactics to guide
the conversation when needed and create an exemplary user
experience.
If possible, customer contact organizations should consider
starting with the customer segment that is most receptive
to adopting new technology. Any issues that are identified
can then be resolved before expanding the deployment to
additional customer segments.
Additionally, organizations should define clear objectives
and success metrics early on so that they know precisely
what results are expected from the chatbot. Finally, to en-
sure user loyalty, organizations should routinely review and
update any content used within their bots to make sure it is
accurate and up to date with any feature changes or other
new developments.
ChatGPT based on GPT-4 is a powerful and innovative tech-
nology that has the potential to revolutionize customer ser-
vice and bring truly natural, conversational AI experiences to
customer contact organizations.
Created by top researchers in the field of AI, GPT-4 provides
a wide range of features and plug-in options to make it easier
for contact centers to incorporate it into their existing chat
tools or other channels. Security measures must be in place
for companies to use this technology safely and efficiently.
Although certain aspects of the technology need improve-
ment before GPT-4 is ready for prime time, and some vendors
have yet to start developing offerings, many leaders in the
contact center industry are already exploring how they can
leverage GPT-4 solutions.
Companies that are interested in this type of technology,
should therefore take careful precautionary steps before de-
ploying ChatGPT-like solutions, like by working with an expe-
rienced objective partner.
While contact center executives are excited about the pos-
sibilities of deploying this advanced level of AI for their chat-
bot solutions, some are concerned that overreliance on such
AI models could result in their contact centers unknowingly
delivering incorrect information to customers.
Many companies are working on ways to ensure the re-
sponsible use of this technology. In some cases, this may
mean tasking contact center associates with monitoring
where the technology gets things wrong and then feeding it
new information.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Q: WHAT IS INVOLVED WITH INSTALLING GPT-4 IN
THE CONTACT CENTER?
A: Installing GPT-4 in the contact center requires a clear strat-
egy. To get started, users will need to decide which channels
they want to incorporate – including any websites or apps
attached to the existing customer service infrastructure.
After this, data integration via API is necessary so the agents
can query information and offer the most efficient solutions.
Finally, training agents on GPT-4 is essential for maximizing
the tool’s potential to learn different conversational intents
and extract key customer information. With a well-thought-
out installation process, contact centers can benefit from a
much-improved CX with AI-driven solutions.
In summary, to incorporate ChatGPT into a contact center,
businesses need to choose a provider that meets their needs,
set up the chatbot, integrate it with other channels and data
sources, train the chatbot and agents, and monitor and opti-
mize its performance continually.
Q: WHAT ARE YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS TO
CUSTOMER CONTACT ORGANIZATIONS THAT ARE
INTERESTED IN DEPLOYING CHATGPT
SOLUTIONS?
A: Deploying ChatGPT solutions can be a great way for cus-
tomer contact organizations to streamline the CX and reduce
response times.
FEATURE
IF POSSIBLE, CUSTOMER
CONTACT ORGANIZATIONS
SHOULD CONSIDER STARTING
WITH THE CUSTOMER SEGMENT
THAT IS MOST RECEPTIVE TO
ADOPTING NEW TECHNOLOGY.
ENABLING A NEW GENERATION OF CX AND EX PROFESSIONALS to
create successful customer management strategies, develop
cutting-edge technologies, refine the skills necessary to advance
their career, and build a culture that advances the contact center
within the organization—that’s what we do.
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advisory board, expert magazine authors, blog contributors,
and industry insiders; keeping our audience ahead of the trends
transforming the contact center and customer sales, service, and
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engage with their customers.
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